Courtisane Festival

Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research
invites
Courtisane – fes­tival and plat­form for film and audio­vi­sual art, Ghent
9, 10 and 11th of December 2021

Since 2002, Courtisane has been orga­nizing a fes­tival in Ghent: its pro­gram­ma­tion con­sti­tutes a kalei­do­scopic mosaic of styles, media, ges­tures, lan­guages and emo­tions; a patch­work of recent and his­tor­ical works that share an insa­tiable hunger for exper­i­men­ta­tion, a per­sonal sig­na­ture, and a sense of resis­tance. This invi­ta­tion takes the form of a three-day pro­gram that brings together short films by Kevin Jerome Everson, sev­eral works by Lis Rhodes, as well as films by Annik Leroy, Beatrice Gibson and Nina Menkes.

Program

See the pro­gram

Thursday, December 9th, at 7 pm :

Kevin Jerome Everson

Material, pro­ce­dure and pro­cess: these three words define the core of artist-film­maker Kevin Jerome Everson’s artistic prac­tice. It is with this approach, grounded in an early pref­er­ence for min­i­malism and a back­ground in sculp­ture and street pho­tog­raphy, that he knows like no other how to evoke the poetics of the lives and expe­ri­ences of working-class African-American com­mu­ni­ties.
Living and teaching in Virginia but born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, as the child of par­ents who came from Mississippi during the Great Migration, Everson makes films that are inex­tri­cably linked to the socio-eco­nomic con­di­tions and his­to­ries of the Midwest and South of the United States. In over twenty years, he has pro­duced a con­tin­u­ously growing body of work of more than 170 short films and a dozen full-length films, which time and again stand out for their excep­tional care for the speci­fici­ties of place, move­ment, speech and form.
Film still from « IFO », Kevin Jerome Everson, 2017. © Picture Palace Pictures

Kevin Jerome Everson, Eason, 2016, 15’
(with French sub­ti­tles)
Part of the one-hun­dred anniver­sary of the great Black migra­tion in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Eason is loosely based on the life of James Walker Hood Eason (1886-1923) a long-time member of the UNIA of Philadelphia.

Kevin Jerome Everson, Fe26, 2014, 7’
(with French sub­ti­tles)
Shot on 16mm in the summer of 2013, Fe26 fol­lows two gentlemen around the East Side of Cleveland, Ohio, and exam­ines the ten­sions between illegal work — in this case, the stealing of man­hole covers and copper piping — and the basic sur­vival tac­tics that exist in areas of high unem­ploy­ment.

Kevin Jerome Everson, Sound That, 2014, 12’
(with French sub­ti­tles)
Sound That fol­lows employees of the Cleveland Water Department on the hunt for what lies beneath, as they inves­ti­gate for leaks in the infras­truc­ture in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The sound invites the viewer/lis­tener into the hollow sounds lurking under Cleveland’s sur­faces.

Claudrena N. Harold, Kevin Jerome Everson, Hampton, 2019, 7’
The University of Virginia gospel choir, Black Voices, is returning from a tri­umphant con­cert in Hampton Roads.

Kevin Jerome Everson, Music from the Edge of the Allegheny Plateau, 2019, 7’
Rappers and gospel singers, on the streets and in their homes. Everson was inspired by William Klein’s The Little Richard Story (1980), a film that tells the story of the rock-and-roll icon’s life through the eyes and expe­ri­ences of friends, family, and imper­son­ators.

Kevin Jerome Everson, IFO, 2017, 10’
(with French sub­ti­tles)
In Mansfield, Ohio, mul­tiple UFO sight­ings yield both pas­sionate firsthand accounts and detailed reflec­tions; mean­while, sub­urban youths raise their arms toward the heavens in becalmed sur­render.

Kevin Jerome Everson, Ears, Nose & Throat, 2016, 10’
(with French sub­ti­tles)
A woman’s tes­ti­mo­nial fac­ul­ties are con­firmed through med­ical exam­i­na­tions before she recites a tragic story, whose hor­rors we don’t see, hear, or smell, but can imagine far too easily.

Kevin Jerome Everson, Recovery, 2020, 10’
An Airman is training to be a pilot at Columbus Air Force Base 14th Flying Training Wing in Columbus, Mississippi.

Friday, December 10th, at 7 pm :

Annik Leroy

Annik Leroy, Tremor, 2017, 92’
Es ist immer Krieg: haunting words bor­rowed from poet and writer Ingeborg Bachmann provide the sub­title for Annik Leroy’s newest film, TREMOR (2017). But the sen­tence also brings to bear a sen­ti­ment that runs through all of the work of this Brussels-based pho­tog­ra­pher and film­maker: a sense of non-rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, of refusing to resign one­self to the vio­lences that per­meate our daily lives. Leroy’s films remind us how his­to­ries of oppres­sion and injus­tice keep on haunting the pre­sent, how their pres­ence can not only be per­ceived in the scars ingrained in the phys­ical land­scapes that tra­verse con­tem­po­rary Europe, but also rever­ber­ates in innu­mer­able instances of vio­lence and destruc­tion that slip by with impunity. It’s those barely per­cep­tible, brooding tremors that con­tin­u­ally pen­e­trate our everyday lives and inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships, which can be felt throughout the films, videos and instal­la­tions that Leroy has made since 1980; a variety of works that each in their own sin­gular way encap­su­late the words of Bachmann: “Here, in this society, there is always war, there’s no war and peace, there is only war.”

fol­lowed by a talk with the artist and curator Stefano Miraglia

Film still from « Tremor », Annik Leroy, 2017. © Auguste Orts Production / Cobra Films

Saturday, December 11th, at 4 pm :

Lis Rhodes

Introduction by Baptiste Jopeck from the review Les Saisons

Artist and film­maker Lis Rhodes has been making rad­ical and exper­i­mental work that chal­lenges hege­monic nar­ra­tives and the power struc­tures of lan­guage since the 1970s. In doing so, she uses film, sound, drawing, per­for­mance, pho­tog­raphy, writing and polit­ical anal­ysis. Rhodes attended North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, and later taught at the RCA and the Slade, where she was a tutor for 30 years. A key figure in the early years of the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative (LFMC), where she was the cinema pro­grammer, Rhodes was also a founding member of the fem­i­nist film dis­tri­bu­tion net­work Circles.
View of « Light Music », Lis Rhodes, 1975. © Lis Rhodes

Lis Rhodes, Light Music, 1975, 2x16mm, 25’
Light Music was moti­vated by the scant atten­tion being paid to women com­posers in the European tra­di­tion. It began as a com­po­si­tion in draw­ings. In the filming of these draw­ings — it devel­oped into an orches­tra­tion of noise — whereby the inter­vals between the lines reg­ister as dif­fer­en­ti­ated noise or “notes”. The draw­ings were then filmed using a rostrum camera (a type of camera used to ani­mate still images). The move­ment of the camera lens — towards or away from the draw­ings — is heard; as the inter­vals between lines narrow or widen, so the pitch of sound rises or falls. The image pro­duces sound — that is, the playing of lines is lit­er­ally “light” music.

Reading of Lis Rhodes’ Whose History by Elsa Brès (French)

Lis Rhodes, Light Reading, 1978, 16mm, 20’
A turning point in Lis Rhode’s fil­mog­raphy, Light Reading is her first voice-over film as well as her first explic­itly fem­i­nist film. Light Reading inspired a suc­ces­sion of essay­istic fem­i­nist avant-garde films in Britain ; not long after its com­ple­tion, Rhodes wrote “Whose History?”, an essen­tial text that con­fronts the writing of film his­tory for and by men, and more widely the problem of making his­tory.

Lis Rhodes, Running Light, 1996, dig­ital video, 15’
In 1989 as part of research into the state of drinking water sup­plies, Lis Rhodes and Mary Pat Leece vis­ited West Virginia where open cast mining had pol­luted the water sources. As they dis­cuss the dev­as­tating effects of open-pit mining, they bring up another major problem - that of migrant farm­workers.

Aura Satz, Lis Rhodes, The Warning that Never Was, dig­ital video, 9’

Saturday, December 11th, at 6 pm :

Introduction by Jessica Macor

Beatrice Gibson and Nina Menkes

Beatrice Gibson, Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs, 2019, 21’
(English, French & Portuguese spoken, English sub­ti­tles)
Two sis­ters (who are not sis­ters), two preg­nan­cies, a two-seater car, a beauty queen, a poodle. The elec­tion of a second fas­cist — this time in Brazil. A crime thriller without a crime. Based on an orig­inal screen­play by Gertrude Stein, written in 1929 as European fas­cism was gaining momentum, Deux Soeurs is set in con­tem­po­rary Paris in a moment of com­pa­rable social and polit­ical unrest. Casting an inti­mate net­work of the director’s friends and influ­ences as its prin­ciple actors, from renowned New York school poet Alice Notley to edu­cator Diocouda Diaoune and playing on Stein’s interest in auto­bi­og­raphy and rep­e­ti­tion, Deux Soeurs is simul­ta­ne­ously an abstract thriller and a col­lec­tive por­trait. An explo­ration of inher­i­tance, respon­si­bility, ethics and futu­rity.
Film still from « Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs », Beatrice Gibson, 2019 © Beatrice Gibson & VG Bild-Kunst

Nina Menkes, Queen of Diamonds, 1991, 77’
(English spoken, no sub­title)
Queen of Diamonds fol­lows the alien­ated life of Firdaus (Tinka Menkes), a black­jack dealer in a Las Vegas land­scape jux­ta­posed between glit­tering casino lights and the dete­ri­o­rating desert oasis. Negotiating a missing hus­band and neigh­bouring domestic vio­lence, Firdaus’ world unfolds as a frag­mented but hyp­notic inter­play between rep­e­ti­tion and repressed anger. Shot with a beau­tiful com­po­si­tional rigour echoing Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Queen of Diamonds is a remark­able and demanding mas­ter­piece of American inde­pen­dent film­making. Heralded as one of the most chal­lenging and sub­ver­sive film­makers working today, the re-release of Queen of Diamonds marks the start of a new crit­ical recog­ni­tion for Menkes’ ground­breaking body of work.
Film still from « Queen of Diamonds », Nina Menkes, 1991. © Arbelos Films